Do you find it challenging to be funny while seething with anger?  Such is the case for me, thanks to the illustrious workers at Canada Post.  As you may recall, I had the great compliment of having Eric Akis write in glowing terms about my fruitcake in the Victoria Times Colonist.  This caused panic buying at Peppers Foods, so the nice manager re-ordered.

As the last weekend before Christmas was approaching, he asked that the fruitcakes be sent overnight, but not at an insane cost.  I checked around and decided that Canada Post’s Priority Courier service would be the best option.  I packaged up four cases (96 fruitcakes) and mailed them at noon on the 18th with a guarantee that they’d arrive at noon on the 19th.

I spent the last weekend before Christmas feeling smug about all of the successful transactions that had occurred.  Humming away, I answered the phone on Monday the 22nd to this unbelievable question: “Where are the fruitcakes I ordered?”  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut, and raced to the Internet to track the packages.

Sure enough, I saw that they were sitting in Richmond at 10:00 PM on the 19th and no further information was provided.  I phoned the number shown on their site for assistance, and then spent the next hour in a loop which ended nowhere.  Finally, I drove to the post office from where I’d mailed them, and they informed me that the tracking branch of Canada Post, the inside workers, were on strike!

The nice clerk at the post office said, “Once the strike is over they’ll refund you the courier fee.”  To which I replied that I didn’t care about the refunded fee, but was very concerned that a seasonal product had not been delivered on time to the store.  She explained that there was nothing that anyone could do.  I drove home feeling completely defeated.

The fruitcakes finally arrived on the 23rd, but as the manager said, so many people had left mad that he was worried he’d have trouble selling them at this point.  I just have to think positively, as who wouldn’t want a fruitcake to ring in the New Year?  I just read that in Scotland a fruitcake is eaten on New Year’s Day for good luck.

By the 24th I had largely gotten over the upset, as it was time to get ready for our traditional Christmas Eve.  Mom and Gerry arrived with Schwartzie, and the four of us plus them made for a happy evening of carols, gifts, food and wine.  I successfully made a Jewish dish, knishes and brisket, which Gerry loved.

Vast amounts of food were also consumed on Christmas Day as I made the ubiquitous turkey dinner with all the trimmings.  Luke has the appetite of a super model after the last runway show of the season, so has practically eaten us out of house and home.  Oh well.  That’s what the holidays are for.

What a fantastic surprise the manager of Peppers Foods in Victoria and I received on Sunday.  Eric Akis, food writer and cookbook author, wrote a column for the Victoria Times Colonist in which he listed locally produced delicacies for Christmas and where one could find them.  He ended the column with the heading Fabulous Fruitcake, and extolled mine by saying, “It’s not often you can use ‘fruitcake’ and ‘fabulous’ in the same sentence, but I do when describing the cakes produced by the Kelowna company Nuttier than a Fruitcake.”

This of course brought a flood of people to Peppers, and so I hurriedly shipped six cases to the store.  As well, I was very fortunate that Phil Johnson, the host of Kelowna’s AM 1150 morning show called me again.  He did a brief interview, and then on Monday he’s going to do a give-away of a couple of my fruitcakes, so that will also drive people to the stores.

This has all been very good, but it’s been a tough week standing in the various Quality Greens stores.  Due to the blizzard on Thursday I had to cancel my gig in Penticton, but as my route would have taken me through Westbank, which received 46 centimetres of snow, I felt that risking my life for fruitcake wasn’t worth it.

I was frozen solid upon leaving the Westbank Quality Greens demo, and learned that more layers are good.  So yesterday in Vernon I was dressed a bit more warmly, yet still froze!  With the doors opening and closing every few minutes, it’s hard to keep warm.  The staff told me they wear several layers, plus hats and boots and are barely able to survive.

While in Vernon I was interviewed by the business editor of the Vernon Morningstar newspaper.  She also took a photo, but this unfortunately won’t appear in the paper until next Sunday.  However, some people eat fruitcake between Christmas and New Year’s, so it will still help with sales.

My friend and baking assistant, Marilyn, happened to be listening to a new FM station in town, and the host, a 20-something, said some disparaging things about fruitcake.  She promptly phoned in and set him straight, and then phoned me.  So the next day I took him a fruitcake and told him to try it.  I said if he thought it was really terrible he could continue to disparage fruitcake.

I had the station on, so had the great pleasure of hearing him say, “Okay, here I go.  Mmmmph (chomping sounds).  Mmmm.  Hey, this is actually good!”  Even after a break he returned to the topic of how Nuttier than a Fruitcake makes a really good product.  I was really happy about that, as another convert puts me that much closer to fruitcake heaven, doesn’t it?

I suppose instead of whining about how tired I am, I should be thanking the Gods of Christmas Merriment that I’m not hung over to boot.  Last night Denis and I were invited to our friends Bob and Jerralynn’s for a Christmas party.  After the pino gris and gewurtztraminer, one of my last acts of the night was to send a glass of wine flying off the counter where it then shattered on the floor.  Oopsies!

So today I’ve spend my time quietly baking cookies, as I’ve been doing for the past week.  I always make my granny’s cookies, the spitzbubchen, but this year I decided to make zimmtsterne (cinnamon stars) as well.  Both of these recipes must be well over 120 years old, as my granny, born in 1899, learned them from her mother.

I’ve been making batches of these cookies to give away to various (very select) people.  However, there’s a nasty downside to the cookie production.  Invariably, six or eight cookies will not fit into the tin, so I put them ‘aside.’  I then decide that I can certainly eat ONE cookie, and not wreck all of my hard work on Weight Watchers.  Soon I have finished the sixth or eighth cookie and feel really annoyed.

Perhaps I’ll lose weight from the upcoming Week from Hell.  Quality Greens is my largest customer, so when they ask me for a favour, I do it.  They’re going to run their usual ad in the newspaper, but in it they will be featuring my product.  The ad will run the week prior to Christmas, so they asked me if I’d be willing to do demos in each of their four stores during that time.  I said sure, and am now wondering how I’ll survive it.

We’ve just had quite a big snowfall, and are sitting at minus 10, and I’ll be demo’ing fruitcake in Penticton, Kelowna, Vernon and Westbank.  I should probably take my space heater and an extension cord as the demos will be three hours in length.  The things I have to do to flog this product!

Last week we went to a tree farm and picked out a tree that was cut on the spot and has filled the house with an insanely strong scent of pine. For years I’ve been buying the cultured Douglas firs, as they’re easy to decorate.  All of the decorations can go on the ends, but with this pine and its leggy branches, it takes a lot more decorations.

What a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate my committment to Canada! As I said to the women at the gym, it is our patriotic duty to shop.  When one of them asked, “How so?” I explained that in recessionary times we are to spend, spend, spend.  It’s wrong and unpatriotic not to do so.  Not willing to be branded a traitor, I went out and bought tons of the most adorable Christmas decorations, and now our tree is absolutely resplendent.

I have to say that a large part of my business’ success has been due to the help I’ve received from others.  It would be great to say that meant people like my husband, but I’m talking about real help from strangers.  For example, though I always have CBC Radio on, due to the crisis in Ottawa, I happened instead to be watching TV on Tuesday afternoon.

The phone rang, and a woman said, “Phone in to CBC Radio right away.  They’re trying to find fruitcake makers in BC.”  I quickly put on the radio and heard Mark Forsythe talking about Christmas foods.  As I was desperately looking on-line for the call-in number, the phone rang again and the same nice woman gave me the number!

I dialed, and the screener asked me what my call was about.  I told her I’d heard they were searching for purveyors of fruitcake, and that actually, I was Canada’s Fruitcake Queen!  She put me on hold for about 30 seconds, and suddenly I was on Almanac, talking to Mark Forsythe, whose show I’ve always adored.

He asked me what my secret was, and I told him about the chunks of chocolate as well as the booze-soaking after they’re baked.  Then he asked me how people can reach me, and I told all of the listeners my website’s address.  As soon as I hung up, one customer phoned to order five, and when I went on-line, a dozen orders were waiting for me!  Once again, don’t ya just love CBC?

Later that afternoon, the kind customer who’d phoned me to let me know about the show called back.  It turns out that her name is Colleen, and she lives in Quesnel.  She’d ordered some fruitcakes in the summer, and liked them a lot.  She placed another order, and I stuck a fruitcake in there as thanks.  Very meager, I know, for all that she’s done for me.

As I write this I hear Denis in the bedroom next door.  He’s snoring, and the sound of his exhalations reminds me of the far-off lowing of a cow.  He’ll get up groggily in an hour or two, eat breakfast, drink a litre of coffee, and settle himself in front of the computer.  Then he’ll proceed to play World War 2 on-line for the next several hours.

My Sunday will unfold somewhat differently.  After making the bed and cleaning up the kitchen, I plan to do some Christmas baking and continue packaging my orders.  I’ll vacuum, clean the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, and then make my weekly call to my mom.  For fun, sometimes I like to sum up my list of things done at the end of the day to Denis, who very kindly replies, “Good work, dear!”